‘Bound for Glory’ on Video: This Land Was Guthrie’s Land

In 1976, an obscure, one-term Georgia governor with a progressive agenda was elected president of the United States. Appropriately enough, that year was notable for a rise in Hollywood’s interest in American folk heroes, old and new.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post journalists who unearthed the Watergate scandal, became household names with “All the President’s Men.” Robert Altman cast Paul Newman as Buffalo Bill. Gordon Parks made a film about the folk singer Leadbelly, and Hal Ashby adapted Woody Guthrie’s memoir, “Bound for Glory,” with David Carradine starring as Guthrie. (The role had been dangled before Bob Dylan who, according to Mr. Ashby’s biographer, turned it down but offered to direct.)

Ambitious and visually striking, “Bound for Glory,” now on Blu-ray from Twilight Time, set out to amplify, if not remake, the movie that most impressed its hero: John Ford’s “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940). There is even a direct family connection: Mr. Carradine’s father, John Carradine, played Preacher Casey in Mr. Ford’s film. But unlike his father, David Carradine gives a restrained, even enigmatic, performance, effectively tempering the movie’s hagiographic impulses.

Focusing on four years in the late 1930s, “Bound for Glory” opens in a bleak Texas town with Woody haphazardly looking for ways to make a living — sign painting, mind reading, dabbling in music. In another context, he might have founded a religion. Abruptly, he deserts his wife (Melinda Dillon) and two small children and rides the rails to California, absorbing the vibe, living in migrant camps and entertaining the huddled masses.

Shot by Haskell Wexler, who won an Oscar for cinematography that year, “Bound for Glory” looks terrific. “It’s so beautiful you can get a high from the dust,” Pauline Kael ended her review in The New Yorker. An early use of the Steadicam promoted the illusion of immersion in the vast migrant camp constructed by the production designer Michael Haller. Many movies followed “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) in visualizing the Great Depression in the style of the photographers Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. None were more successful in their simulation than “Bound for Glory.”

Charismatic but hardly likable, Mr. Carradine’s Woody is driven by stubborn, selfish integrity. Even after he gets a radio gig as a hillbilly performer, he continues to sing out for the dispossessed. Resisting commercial (and family) pressures to conform, he quits his radio show, walks out on an audition and heads for New York. The movie sanitizes Mr. Guthrie’s politics a bit and ends before he took New York lefties by storm, introduced as a “real Dust Bowl refugee” at a benefit “Grapes of Wrath Evening” — but then, the way Mr. Guthrie became an American symbol is the meaning of “Bound for Glory.”

“Bound for Glory” was one of five films in 1976 focusing on the mythology of the hero — and antihero — that were nominated for best picture. But in the end, Mr. Ashby’s film, along with “All the President’s Men,” “Taxi Driver” and “Network,” which introduced the populist TV demagogue Howard Beale, fell short. The Academy was enamored of a more endearing folk tale: “Rocky.”

“The Southerner” (1945), the third of five features Jean Renoir directed in Hollywood, now on Blu-ray from Kino Classics, might have been made for Woody Guthrie.

A New Deal inspirational in the tradition of “The Grapes of Wrath,” adapted from George Session Perry’s novel “Hold Autumn in Your Hand,” Mr. Renoir’s film recounts a year in the hardscrabble life of a Texas tenant farmer (Zachary Scott) and his family. (The parallels to Mr. Guthrie’s posthumously published novel, “House of Earth,” are so pronounced that some have speculated it was inspired by “The Southerner.”)

Even as an exposé of rural poverty by a left-wing filmmaker, working from an adaptation by a future blacklisted writer, Hugo Butler, “The Southerner” is notably devoid of politics. Like Mr. Renoir’s 1936 short feature, “A Day in the Country,” or “The River,” which he made in India after leaving the United States, “The Southerner” is essentially pantheist.

Mr. Renoir described “The Southerner” as a work “in which things and men, animals and Nature, all would come together in an immense act of homage to the divinity.” (Satyajit Ray was much taken with the film, which in some ways anticipates his first feature, “Pather Panchali.”) The landowners and bosses who embody the system are eclipsed as villains by the combined forces of floods, malnutrition and human nature — embodied by Mr. Scott’s supremely ornery neighbor (J. Carrol Naish) and his feebleminded nephew (Norman Lloyd), a character developed by William Faulkner, who worked uncredited as Mr. Renoir’s script adviser.

In a review for The Nation, James Agee characterized “The Southerner” as “one of the most sensitive and beautiful American-made pictures I have seen,” but he also called the film out for its inauthenticity — more in sorrow than anger, since he was a Southerner himself. As the author of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” a document of the Dust Bowl-era American South featuring photographs by Mr. Evans, Mr. Agee took “The Southerner” personally. He was not alone. The movie was banned in Tennessee and attacked throughout the South. A modest hit, it failed to win any Oscars, but it did take the Gold Lion at the first postwar (and post-Fascist) Venice Film Festival.

Mastered from a U.C.L.A. restoration, the Blu-ray is well augmented with two extras: “A Salute to France” (1944), a bit of wartime propaganda made by Mr. Renoir with Garson Kanin, and “The River” (1938), Pare Lorentz’s influential New Deal documentary on managing the Mississippi.

NEWLY RELEASED

A BALLERINA’S TALE Nelson George directed this documentary portrait of Misty Copeland, who, by breaking the color line last year as the American Ballet Theater’s first African-American prima ballerina, became something more than just a brilliant dancer. “The film’s most dramatic moments are glimpses of pain and uncertainty,” Brian Seibert wrote in The New York Times in October. Available on Blu-ray, DVD and Amazon Video. (IFC)

FATHERLAND A truculent East German troubadour is sent west in Ken Loach’s Cold War tale, reissued on Blu-ray, about the perils of protest singing on both sides of the Wall. “Though the film’s portrait of Western decadence is laid on with a trowel, it’s also pretty funny,” Vincent Canby wrote when “Fatherland,” then titled “Singing the Blues in Red,” opened in New York in 1988. (Twilight Time)

THE GIRLS IN THE BAND: COLLECTOR’S EDITIONJudy Chaikin’s documentary recounts the careers of female jazz instrumentalists, from the pianist-singer Lil Hardin Armstrong and pianist-arranger Mary Lou Williams to the integrated International Sweethearts of Rhythm and beyond. “Engaging, informative, thorough and brimming with delightful characters,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in The Times in 2013. On DVD and Amazon Video. (Virgil Films)

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS Joel and Ethan Coen evoke the Greenwich Village folk scene on the brink of Bob Dylan’s success in this caustic, flavorsome period piece, which A. O. Scott called “a brilliant magpie’s nest of surrealism, period detail and pop-culture scholarship” in his 2013 review for The Times. Extras on the Blu-ray reissue include a documentary of the tribute concert inspired by the movie and Dan Drasin’s “Sunday” (1961), documenting the “folk song riot” in Washington Square. (Criterion)

PASSAGE TO MARSEILLE Woody Guthrie’s guitar was emblazoned with the slogan “This machine kills fascists”; the same motto applies to the Free France Übermensch played by Humphrey Bogart in this 1944 Michael Curtiz war movie, now on Blu-ray, featuring flashbacks within flashbacks and three members of the “Casablanca” gang: Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Claude Rains. (Warner Archive)

A version of this article appears in print on , Section AR, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: This Land Was Woody Guthrie’s Land. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe